This essay reviews two recent examples of scholarship on “strongman politics” in the Philippines. These books take issue with academic and popular acceptance of the explanatory power of “traditional” patron-client relations (Sidel) and identity politics (Abinales) in shaping the Philippine political landscape. Sidel uses the concept of “bossism” and Abinales the concept of “strongmen” to re-analyze the link between “state” and “society,” underscoring the legacies of the historical process of American colonial state formation. For these scholars, state-formation did not develop separately from the rise of strongmen, but laid the groundwork for the emergence and consolidation of strongman power. Furthermore, because both draw their case studies from outside the capital city of Manila, they explore the complex relations between the local and the national, thereby illuminating the web of power relations that define politicking and representation.

But these works diverge crucially on the question of strongmen’s relationship to their constituents and their use of “coercive pressures” (in the form of violence and electoral fraud). Abinales sees the blurring between the official and the personal as a form of governance itself, where Sidel sees a predatory state that is a creature of predatory bosses who are part of a complex network of bosses. Such divergence in interpretation brings sharply into focus the following issues: What kind of responses are possible for Filipino strongmen and the rest of the population? To what extent does scholarship itself impose limits on understanding the complex nature of political power in post-colonial Philippines?

NEW | THE BLOOMING YEARS

Download a compilation of all the English KRSEA articles from Issue 13 (March 2013), to Issue 20 (September 2016). This period marked a turning point for KRSEA with the re-launch of the website in March 2013 and the new online archive of earlier issues.

Trendsetters

Since Simon Anholt (1998, 395), an independent policy advisor, first coined the term ‘nation branding’ in the late 1990s and proposed that nations, like products, can be branded and marketed through the use of commercial techniques, nation branding has become a widespread and popular practice in which many countries all over the world engage. Although most people typically associate nation branding with externally-oriented tourism and export promotion campaigns, nation branding [...]